Teen charged with assault after striking woman with snowball from Aspen hotel roof
A 19-year-old tourist from Chicago allegedly hit a woman walking down the street in the face with a snowball from the roof of a downtown hotel last weekend.
Editor’s note: The cases against the teen and his mother in described in the story below were dismissed by motion of the prosecution and have since been sealed by the court.
A 19-year-old tourist from Chicago allegedly hit a woman walking down the street in the face with a snowball from the fourth floor roof of a downtown hotel last weekend, according to a police report.
In addition, the teen’s mother allegedly tried repeatedly to shield her son from talking to police and was also charged in the case, the report states.
“We don’t usually write people up for a friendly snowball fight,” Aspen Assistant Police Chief Bill Linn said Thursday. “But when someone gets hit like this, it’s way over the line.”
The teen was charged with misdemeanor third-degree assault and his mother was charged with obstructing an officer.
The incident began at 10:45 p.m. on March 18 after a 60-year-old Texas man and his 56-year-old wife told police they’d been walking past the W Hotel on South Spring Street after dinner when the woman was struck in the face with a snowball, according to the police report.
When officers met with the woman, “her lower left lip was red and swollen” and “she was angry,” the report states. She declined an ambulance.
After his wife was hit, the man told police he looked up and saw a young man four stories up on the W Hotel’s pool deck.
“He spoke with the W Hotel security and they told him they had trouble with two 19-year-old males from earlier in the day, who were throwing snowballs from the pool area,” according to the police report, which was requested Monday by The Aspen Times and released Thursday.
The W Hotel’s director of security told the investigative officer that an employee of the Little Nell Hotel — next door to the W Hotel — had called at 7 a.m. March 18 and said two young men had been throwing snowballs from the W’s fourth-floor pool deck, the report states.
W Hotel security went to the roof at that time, stopped the two 19-year-olds — who admitted throwing the snowballs — and recorded the room in which they were staying. After the Texas woman was struck in the face that night, the W’s security director found a surveillance camera image of the man suspected of throwing the snowball and was able to track him to the same room, according to the police report.
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